Disclosure: My attendance at Education Nation (#EduNationAu) was through a media pass provided by the conference organisers.
​
If you have missed the previous articles in the Education Nation series, you can find them here.

Lila Mularczyk’s presentation closed out session one of day two at Education Nation and took us into the morning break. I made the decision, still feeling like I had conference brain, that I would sit out during Murat Dizdar’s (@dizdarm) presentation about the national education reform program which commenced session two. I spoke to Murat briefly who gave me permission to record it so that I could listen to it later on. When I sat down yesterday to transfer the photos I had taken from my phone and tablet to my computer, I saw an image of some carpet and, thinking it was an accidental photo of the floor, hit delete. My brain processed, about two seconds later, that it had also had the film strip icon. So I, unfortunately, have nothing to show for Murat’s presentation, for which I can only apologise.

​Following Murat’s presentation was Professor Ken Wiltshire speaking about the future of curriculum in Australia. I have only a few written notes from Professor Wiltshire’s presentation, however, there was an active Twitter conversation throughout his session, which I was involved with and have captured via a storify, which you can find here. Some of the key points that I have noted down that Professor Wiltshire sees learning as having four dimensions:

​He commented that few of the recommendations from the review of the national curriculum had been adopted and brought up a number of reforms that he felt should occur, including but not limited to an enforcement of compulsory schooling and the enactment of the National Curriculum as well as a national forum on the purposes of education, values and foundations which should underpin education.

​Further, he proposes that we need a national body, that is apolitical to be tasked with writing, reviewing, developing and overseeing education curriculum and assessment, labelling ACARA as a “…horse-trading and political body, not an education body…”

Professor Wiltshire made an interesting comment regarding initial teacher education (ITE), which you can see at the top of the below photo:

I invite you to read through the storify of Professor Wiltshire’s presentation which you can find here and invite anyone who has written about either Professor Wiltshire’s or Murat Dizdar’s presentations (or any other presentation from Education Nation, for that matter) to send me the link to include in this article.

Thank you for reading. If you have missed any articles in this series, you can find the full list here.